Savoring Guatemala’s colonial capital.
Guatemala’s colonial capital attracting attention for its markets, cooking classes and Mayan fusion cuisine.
The morning sun has barely peeked up, but Antigua’s Mayan farmers’ market is already swarming with action, a chaotic kaleidoscope of vendors in vivid traditional clothing selling their produce. Guiding me through the Technicolor maze, chef Kenny Aldana points out neon-orange cashew fruit; avocados, mangoes and melons of all sizes and shapes; edible flowers; fresh fish; and meats, including bizarre displays of dried iguanas.
Bags filled, we return to the El Convento boutique hotel where Aldana holds court in the kitchen. At noon he delivers a market-sourced gourmet feast — chicken bathed in a luscious sauce of pepitoria (traditional roasted and ground squash seeds) with local izote flowers, baby zucchinis and a slice of jicama-like ichuntal lightly battered and fried, perched in a puddle of tomato puree with mild chile. Each flavor is astonishingly rich and strong.
“What’s the best season for fresh ingredients here?” I ask Aldana.
He thinks earnestly. “I think it’s all the time.”
Antigua, with its 18th century cobblestone streets and colonial Spanish architecture that earned it UNESCO World Heritage stature, has long been a cultural destination, charming and walkable with courtyards tucked off main avenues opening into lavish gardens, restaurants, bars and small hotels.
These days, however, a culinary movement is also attracting food lovers to this Guatemalan mountain city for creative farm-to-table dining, culinary and market tours, cooking classes and innovative fusion cuisine in a country that is 66 percent Mayan.
“Guatemala is very diverse culturally, and cooks are starting to gain a sense of pride about it,” says New York and Argentina-trained local chef Rodrigo Aguilar, who specializes in pop up restaurants. “Recently, a wave of younger cooks is showing our roots in a more globalized way, embracing change but respecting tradition by exploring the richness of our ingredients.”
The old Spanish colonial capital of a Guatemala that once included much of Central America and southern Mexico, Antigua is now a small city of 45,000 set amid mountains. The 5,029-foot altitude provides consistent temperatures between 76 and 82 degrees, an idyllic climate the early Spanish dubbed “eternal spring,” perfect for growing just about anything.
Antigua has always taken its produce seriously. Some of the world’s best coffee thrives in plantations just outside the city. I reach Finca Filadelfia via a 15-minute Unimog shuttle from downtown. After an insightful two-hour tour of the mountainside facilities, I sip the premium roast on the sunny dining terrace with a lively group of international caffeine enthusiasts. You can even overnight at the estate’s hotel, alongside the coffee-bean-drying plaza.
I then drop in to the Valhalla macadamia farm, familyowned, organic and serving their fabulous trademark macadamia flour-and-nut pancakes. Next time I’m taking them up on their macadamia oil facials.
Antigua is also renowned for its surrounding avocado groves. The astonishingly high rate of local consumption of the creamy fruit has even earned Antigüeños the nickname “panza verde” — “green bellies.” One morning I stroll through the city toward an organic farm that is pretty much in the suburbs. En route, church bells ring and horse-drawn carriages clatter across cobblestones beneath blossoming jacaranda trees raining mauve petals onto the sidewalk. Exotic hot pink and purple bursts of bougainvillea clamber over stone walls, and the air is filled with the smells of coffee, warm chocolate, tortillas, fresh bread and pastries.
And there are ruins. Frequent roof-rattling earthquakes that eventually persuaded the Spanish to move their capital to more stable Guatemala City have left picturesque remnants of convents, monasteries, churches, a prison and villas now repurposed as settings for pop-up restaurants, live music concerts, souvenir markets and movie screenings. They are so in demand for wedding sites they must be booked almost two years in advance.
Earthquakes are the growling side effect of three enormous steep-sided, often-active volcanoes that form the city’s backdrop.
“The minerals in volcanic soil are responsible for our intensely flavorful produce,” explains Karin Rudberg of Caoba Farm, an organic farm/ shop/learning center and cafe 20 minutes by foot from Antigua’s main square.
It’s also a popular local hub for outdoor yoga, martial arts and permaculture instruction, as well as hosting a farmers’ market for any locals wishing to set up a kiosk on weekends. I bite into a local organic buffalo burger as a jazz trio jams amid a garden of more than 100 different products that provide 85 percent of the cafe’s ingredients.
Caoba also supplies many of Antigua’s best dining spots, and they are a diverse lot, from gourmet delis with innovative lunches like Epicure to traditional Guatemalan and European restaurants or those experimenting with various degrees of fusion. Sabe Rico — “tastes good” — is a welcoming warren of enterprise that includes a local deli, an on-site chocolateria, and a restaurant where fresh, healthy and often vegetarian takes on traditional dishes from enchiladas to chili rellenos are served amid a tropical garden.
Bistro Cinq serves first-class French bistro fare in a trendy downtown setting. Modern, colorful Los Tres Tiempos serves its “nouvelle Guatemalan” renditions of Mayan classics like pepian meat stew and tamales in a colorful modern courtyard. That’s where I meet
Arianna Plisowski of Texas, who worked for a nonprofit and stayed on to start Taste Antigua, offering street food, market and sunset walking tours.
“I researched food vendors for six months, because I knew people wanted to try street food, but were afraid to get sick,” she says.
Street food is actually illegal in Guatemala, but she guides guests to hole-in-thewall mom-and-pop treasures and through the farmers’ market, where she whips out her Swiss Army knife for tasting bites. Her goal is to start her own healthy foodrelated nonprofit that would be funded by her food tours.
Prowling the shop-lined streets, I come across a chocolate museum and the remarkable Dulceria Doña María Gordillo, a landmark 1872 store decorated in religious relics and famous throughout Guatemala for its vast selection of artisan sweets made exactly as nuns did in the city for centuries to raise money. There are macaroons and marzipan, fig delights and candied squash in exquisite forms, but the addictive classic convent candy that will forever haunt me and many expat Guatemalans is canillitas de leche — literally “legs of milk” that melt in your mouth.
I grab a bag of mixed goodies and head for Fat Cat, one of a handful of tiny, unpretentious cafes where the focus is on quality, not decor, and coffeemaking is a science. Fat Cat lists a dozen ways you can have your coffee created, from French press and AeroPress to siphon and Chemex, along with an equally long list of local plantations from which beans are sourced.
The coffee is so fresh and smooth that one day I couldn’t resist hitting three cafes, including La Parada and the Refuge, before heading to the rooftop Antigua Brewing Company bar for a craft beer to calm my caffeinated nerves with skyline views of volatile volcanoes.
When the sun goes down, the nightlife notches up in Antigua with spots like the intimate Tabacos y Vinos wine bar and its great selection of South American wines. La Casa del Ron is a contemporary rum bar featuring tastings, flights and cool cocktails using velvety local premium rums like Zacapa. Especially delicious is rum paired with lime and a sprinkling of fresh cardamom, of which Guatemala is the world’s biggest producer.
“Pour a little cusha on the floor for the dead,” Jose Mario Aguirre of La Cantina instructs me as a local crowd of hipsters settles into his funky, barnboard bar that, in the afternoon, morphs into an offbeat mixology workshop.
The Mayan Drinks and Spirits School introduces keen liquor enthusiasts to cusha, a traditional and largely clandestine Mayan drink distilled from corn and fruit. The workshop uses a legal craft version, but the experience is unique, to say the least. Hint: A shaman and Maximón, a mysterious Mayan deity, are involved.
My final stop is La Tortilla Cooking School, where a Guatemalan chef teaches two halfday courses daily to introduce visitors to six courses of local cuisine while sipping unlimited quantities of wine in a bright space near the farmers’ market.
“Usually we make pepian, tortillas, Guatemalan rice, a plantain desert and a corn flower drink called atol blanco,” says manager Anna Lena Hofmann. She checks the school’s upcoming cooking schedule and gasps.
“If you are still here Thursday, you must come!” she says, her eyes sparkling with excitement “We’re preparing dried iguana.”
It is with relief that I inform her that, sadly, I’ll be on my way home by then.